Booksbooksbooks 12/24
Tiny reviews for books from Shirley Jackson, Martha Wells, Alexandre Dumas, Stanislaw Lem, Stephen Baxter, Stephen King, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Dan Jones, Carlo Rovelli and more.
Stephen King - You Like It Darker (dt. Ihr wollt es dunkler) ★★★★ As with all shortstory collection, this is by definition a mixed bag, but you’ll find no bad or boring stories here and some are pretty great with Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream being a brillant standout about guilt, justice and mob rule featuring one of the best antagonists in recent King stories.
Adrian Tchaikovsky - Die Feinde der Zeit (Children of Time #3) ★★★★ Can’t do wrong with Tchaikovsky. I haven’t read an of his fantasy stuff, but his Children of Time aswell as his Shards of Earth-series are sprawling space operas which are dense, sprawling and high-end fun scifi-adventures full of great ideas and action-rich moments. During the first half of this one, however, i thought this would be the first Tchaikovsky i did not like quite as much as the other novels i read. If you know the Children of Time series, you know it’s about terraforming and sped up evolution leading to intelligent spiders in the first, and intelligent squids in the second novel. In this one he adds crows to the mix and tells that story as a fantasy/fairytale story set on a human colony on a hostile planet. Didn’t really work for me (i’m not very into fantasy) until he drops the curtain and nothing is as it seems, fusing the fairytale-in-space with the hard scifi space opera adventures he’s famous for. Pretty good, as always.
Stephen Baxter - The thousand Earths (dt. Die tausend Erden) ★★ I like to read Baxter novels from time to time when i just want a throwaway scifi story that has some sprawling space future whoo whoo images but not much more. Baxter delivers, including stereotypical characters and tired tropes.
Eberhard Rathgeb - Die Entdeckung des Selbst: Die Entdeckung des Selbst: Wie Schopenhauer, Nietzsche und Kierkegaard die Philosophie revolutionierten (eng. Discovery of the Self: How Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard revolutionised Philosophy) ★★★ A decent dive into thinking of said philosophers in context of the titular development of individualism in Europe during the romantic era. The author compares the biographies of those thinkers who all in their own way had to deal with loneliness, leading them — by circumstances, arrogance or sheer stubbornness — to write the classics about how to “become who you are” (Nietsche). (The author then unncecessarily excursions into art history which i’m sure many people might enjoy, but i found it annoying — but that’s just a minor critique for an otherwise pretty decent and enjoyable book.)
Alaina Urquhart - The Butcher and the Wren (dt. Die Jagd) ★★ Cheap thriller fodder from a true crime podcaster and if i knew that last piece of info before purchase, i wouldn’t have bought the book.
Armen Avanessian, Daniel Falb - Planeten Denken: Hyper-Antizipation und Biografische Tiefenzeit (eng. Thinking Planets: Hyper-Anticipation and biographical Deeptime) ★★★★ Short book introducing planetarism as one of the latest developments in the humanities, a new way of thinking about the impacts of earth systems on sociology and psychology. How does climate change and it’s forceful refocussing of human perspective on timeframes outside of biographical experience transform our thinking? Pretty good book written in a pretty understandable non-jargon (and even funny) language about a topic that will accompany us for many many decades to come.
Stanisław Lem - Golem XIV (dt. Also sprach Golem) ★★★★ One of those fictional books by Stanisław Lem, a fictional documentation of two lectures held by an Artificial Intelligence and an afterword from one of the developing scientists. The A.I. in the book does not become, as governments and researchers hoped for, a brillant military strategist, but a nietzschean philosopher who climbs down from his synthetic ivory tower to lecture us mere humans on their insufficient and futile anthropocentrism. A fun read, if a bit dated.
Michael Tomassello - The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans (dt. Die Evolution des Handelns) ★★★★ Tomassello lays down his theory on the titular evolution of agency, which he develops comparing the psychological features of lizards, squirrels, chimps and humans, all representing different stages of evolution. Over time, he states, evolution developed feedback control systems which are only rudimentary in lizards, but get ever more sophisticated over evolutionary time leading up to the human psyche and consciousness. I consider Tomassello the one evolutionary psychologist who “figured it out”: his theories about the (cultural) evolution of the human mind is a class of its own, and this book is no exception.
Lee Child - Without Fail (dt. Tödliche Absicht, Reacher #6) ★★ / Gone Tomorrow (dt. Underground, Reacher #13) ★★★ / Better Off Dead (with Andrew Child, dt. Der Kojote, Reacher #26) ★★ / Past Tense (dt. Der Spezialist, Reacher #23) ★★★ / Night School (dt. Der Ermittler, Reacher #21) ★★★ — Yeah, I have to admit i’m getting a bit tired of Reacher by now, especially the later ones Lee Child writes together with his brother Andrew and which are just not very good. I still had a good time with most of these and Reacher is still my fallback if i just want some not-dumb entertaining action without subtexts or messaging. I have six novels to go then i read the whole series and i’d consider most of them worth your time, some of the earlier ones are even brillant.
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Christo (dt. Der Graf von Monte Christo) ★★★ Oh god this book, i hated it with a gut. Don't get me wrong: It's a sprawling adventure that may not be very deep, but greatly plotted and featuring some unforgetable imaginary. It absolutely deserves its place within the canon of great adventure literature. But WOW do those dialogues drag along! These people need 20 pages to say "Can you please hand me the water please" or whatever, and unfortunately, the book is full of lengthy dialogue. I mean, ofcourse a novel set in post-revolution france can’t not engulf itself in the complicated aristocratic language with all the “Oh Monseigneur!” and such, but at 1500 pages for the unabriged version this orgy of aristocratic blabber just annoyed the eff out of me. So yeah, i did like it, esspecially the more colorful scenes featuring bandits and caves rebuilt into weird luxury mansions full of dope and imaginary dancers — but i also hated it and it took me half a year to get through it. I'll pass Dumas' Three Musketeers then, i guess.
Martha Wells - The Murderbot Diaries #1-4 (dt. Tagebuch eines Killerbots) ★★★ A collection of Martha Wells’ murderbot novellas marketed in the german edition as a novel. The four stories work well on their own, but as a novel they become very repetitive which combined with the sometimes more cynical takes of its main character can become a kind of annoying read. However, the stories grew on me after the first hald and i warmed up to it. Fun read.
Thomas Metzinger - Bewusstseinskultur: Spiritualität, intellektuelle Redlichkeit und die planetare Krise (eng. Culture of Awareness: Spirituality, intellectual integrity and the planetary crisis) ★★★ Metzinger is a well known neuro philosopher in germany writing a lot about consciousness and the mind and here he lays down his perspectives on the climate crisis, which will lead up to a “panic-point” of awakening, and how humanity can deal with the world after that point. His solution is, basically, a turn inwards: To develop mental skills through meditative practice to become prepared for the unknown. I share his view of a “panic-point”, but i’m not sure if the development of society wide secular spirituality that centers the human mind can help with the very materialist upheavals which are about to come. But it’s an interesting perspective and one which i haven’t read anywhere else in context of climate change.
Claudia Kemfert, Julien Gupta, Manuel Kronenberg - Unlearn CO2 ★★★ A useful if (very) incomplete overview of all the aspects of climate change and the activism necessary to (at least try to) turn this ship around. Activists and climate researchers write in short essays about work, media, desinformation, mobility, fashion, growth, labor or the law and how they relate to climate, how they contribute to carbon emissions and what can be done within those realms. A good book to get a perspective on the many, many fields contributing to the climate crisis, but unfortunately some crucial fields are completely absent, first and foremost the construction sector (we will not fix climate change without scalable solutions for the production of concrete). A bit more scientific depth and rigor would’ve turned this okay-to-good overview into an actually good book, but maybe i’m wrong and this is exactly the right tone to get the overall message across. In this dire situation, i think that anything that helps, helps.
Michael Köhlmeier - Das Philosophenschiff (eng. The Ship of Philosophers) ★★★★ Short novela about the deportation of russian intellectuals on cruise ships during soviet stalinism, a story told by a 100 year old famous architect to an author of fiction. I’m not very much into russian history, but i really liked this novel, especially the centenarian and her wit. It’s actually not a novel about deportation and philosophers or ships, it’s a novel about truth and accounts of historical events, about how minds intertwine fiction and reality to form biographies and do so, in best of cases, with a lot of humor and nonchalance.
Shirley Jackson - The Haunting οf Hill House (dt. Spuk in Hill House) ★★★★★ I loved the 1963 movie of “The Haunting” when i discovered it as a teenager and it stuck with me ever since. The novel is equally brillant, especially Jacksons elaborate style which uses repetition to a great poetic effect giving the developing madness of her main character a spiraling aesthetic that is very tangible, giving you the creeps until the very end. And the final sentence is still sending shivers down my spine: “Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.” A brillant classic of horror literature, no less.
Dan Jones - Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages (dt. Mächte und Throne: Eine neue Geschichte des Mittelalters) ★★★★ 700 page door stopper (sans appendix) telling the history of the middle ages roughly from Byzantium to Luther and the Printing Press. If you condense 1000 years into 700 pages you have to leave out things, but Jones manages to develop a panoramic view about history in so many aspects from so many regions, from Mongolia and China to the Americas and medieval Europe that this book feels, if not complete, at least satisfyingly rich and sprawling. A great history book in the same vein as Robin Lane Fox’ The Classical World.
Guido Tonelli - Matter: The Magnificent Illusion (dt. Die Illusion der Materie: Was die neue Physik über unsere Welt verrät) ★★★★ Tonelli is a italian researcher working at the LHC in CERN and worked on the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012. In this books he retells the evolution of the science of matter, from the first atomists in antic greece to Newton and the discovery of quantum mechanics. I’m not sure what’s about italian physicists being great writers, but after Carlo Rovelli this is the second italian scientists writing about science in great literary style, sometimes poetically even. Tonelli stays more on subject than Rovelli, but in both cases i find this literary perspective on hard science extremely insightful, especially because this more poetic style is perfectly apt for a quantum realm that is first and foremost uncertain, making books by these authors a perfect fit.
Carolin Amwinger, Oliver Nachtwey - Gekränkte Freiheit - Aspekte des libertären Autoritarismus (eng. Freedom Insulted - Aspects of a libertarian Authoritarianism) ★★★★★ The most lucid analysis of contemporary political developments i’ve read in a long time. The authors claim that neoliberalism and austerity politics in the past 50 years created a society in which everybody is free, but freedom has turned from being a public good into a more or less commodified good which you can only achieve through economic success. This results in a manifold increase of “insults to individual freedoms” when people figure out that, despite personal efforts during education and their carreers, they will not make it to the top. Then those people explain this failure not by the complexities of modern societies (which are too complex and advanced for anyone to fully understand anyways), but with conspiracy beliefs, a rightwing turn and plain old racism. The authors then go on to explain modern populist phenomena through this analytical lense, from MAGA to the french yellow jackets to the german “Querdenker” (“diagonal thinkers”) which (often) can’t be nicely aligned with the standard rightwing-leftwing-model. The authors also claim that these phenomena are here to stay, last but not least due to capitalist realism (Mark Fisher) which makes us unable to even consider alternative models of a just society. I pretty much subscribe to all of this. (And, while this is an academic book about a sociological study, it is also very accessible and comparably low on academic jargon, which is a plus.)
Tom Rob Smith - Cold People (dt. Kälte) ★ (did not finish) Ugh. This book is all exposition while storytelling and plot are so lame it baffles me how anyone can read this and not think what a stinker. Filling half a scifi thriller with exposition is boring enough to throw this out, but the author also has no interest in his characters, which are "fleshed out" in three-to-four page backstory vignettes, and they are just one stereotype after the other. The worst: When there actually is some plot happening it is just one clichéd trope after the other and is written in a pseudo-epic kitschy tone. When the teen ice mutant daughter then froze her mothers tears with her fingertip i threw the book away. Waste of time.
GOOD INTERNET ELSEWHERE // Bluesky / Mastodon / Threads / FB / Insta
SUPPORT // Patreon / Steady / Paypal / Spreadshirt
Musicvideos have their own Newsletter: GOOD MUSIC. All killers, No fillers.
Thanks for reading.
